THE BUDDHA AND THE SAHIBS: THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED INDIA'S LOST RELIGION By Charles Allen John Murray/Rupa Price: £14.95 Pages: 308

We live in an era where the meaning of "Orientalism" has been radically transformed. While this was originally used to describe knowledge about the Orient that was initiated by western scholars who were products of the Enlightenment, today it frequently carries heavy pejorative overtones. This has happened most dramatically after Edward Said sent shockwaves by demonstrating that Orientalism was the grid through which western imperialism filtered and misrepresented the Orient to suit its own Occidental prejudices.

That the dust has still not settled on the debates that Said's work spawned is evident from Charles Allen's new book. It has been written to "set the record straight" and to challenge Said by asking him "where we would be without the Orientalists?" India and the wider world, according to Allen, owe a huge debt to Orientalists who "initiated the recovery of South Asia's lost past". His book tries to demonstrate this by taking up the story of the European "discovery" of Buddhism in South Asia.

There are details in this story, told through the careers and contributions of Orientalists ranging from William Jones to Vincent Smith, that readers will find engaging. The manner in which a botanising surgeon, Francis Buchanan, was transformed into a colonial surveyor is as fascinating as Buchanan's description of Bodh Gaya. The book also captures the genius of James Prinsep, who deciphered the edicts of Emperor Asoka (the most famous royal convert to Buddhism) and whose memory was honoured, when he died in 1840, by Indians in Calcutta through the construction of Prinsep's Ghat.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA: Allen; (below) Colonel Colin Mackenzie with Brahmin and Jain pandits and his peon (1815)

There are other details, however, that are either selectively presented or seem to be plain wrong. For instance, Allen talks about the desecration of the Mahabodhi temple by Sasanka, an illustration, one supposes, of the "destructive role of Brahmin zealots in the overthrow of Buddhist viharas". What he fails to mention is that before this, a major phase of reconstruction at the Mahabodhi temple was also undertaken by a Brahmin. Again, the book's assessment of John Marshall, the longest serving director of the Archaeological Survey of British India, has nothing new to offer but gets several of his dates wrong. He did not come to India in 1903 but in 1902 and left Taxila in 1934, not 1937. Most astounding is the author's description of Burma. We are told about a number of tribes that inhabited the region bordering the east of Bengal, "of whom one, the Burma, had long been dominant". This is as shocking for some to read as it would be to Allen if England was described as one of the tribes that inhabited the European continent in the 19th century.

What makes the book fundamentally flawed is its refusal to understand how Asians have viewed the European "discovery" of their lands. In India, a sense of this can be had even from 19th century British accounts, such as a conversation that was recorded by the British Baptist missionary, John Chamberlain. "How is it that your countrymen steal our gods?" a Brahmin is supposed to have asked Chamberlain. The Brahmin used to be the guardian priest of a Lakshmi idol that stood near the Ganga in deltaic Bengal. As the story goes, a British officer, identified as Charles Stuart, initially tried to persuade him to sell the idol, even took him to Calcutta to see the large assemblage of images that he had collected. But the priest refused to sell "his goddess". Stuart then got his people to take away "the goddess by night", leaving both the priest and the pilgrimage spot bereft of their object of reverence.

Writers such as Allen tell the story of westerners like Stuart as if they were involved in a neutral scientific enterprise in the European "Age of Discovery" of India's past. But from the perspective of the devout worshippers whose goddess was taken away or those colonised Indians whose historic buildings and shrines were forcibly acquired, Orientalists and archaeologists could only have been the signifiers of an "Epoch of Loss". A narrative which eulogises the contributions of Orientalists without reflecting upon the colonial violence within which their work unfolded is unconvincing and suspect.